At Jersey Business, we spend a lot of time talking to businesses about resilience. And if we’re honest, resilience often sounds like one of those things you know you should be thinking about… right after you’ve responded to just one more email, joined just one more meeting, and chased one more thing on your to-do list.
Which brings me neatly to this year’s Productivity Survey.
The results won’t come as a huge shock. The top barriers are the same ones you’re probably battling daily: competing priorities, recruitment and retention, lack of time, and inefficiencies in processes and culture. In short, too much to do, not enough time to do it, and systems that don’t always help (or occasionally actively work against us…).
But here’s the stat that made us all sit up: around 24% of the working day is unproductive. That’s roughly two hours per person, per day.
Two hours.
That’s a decent lunch, a workout, or, let’s be honest, the time it takes to try and find that one email you swear existed yesterday.
Now, before we all panic, this isn’t about people not working hard. Quite the opposite. Businesses in Jersey are working incredibly hard. The challenge is that a huge chunk of the day is being lost to low-value tasks, interruptions, clunky processes or simply switching between priorities.
The good news? That’s also where the opportunity is.
If we can claw back even part of that time, the impact on productivity, and profitability, would be significant.
So, where do we start?
The survey points to three key areas: technology, process, and people and culture. Again, not revolutionary, but the shift we’re seeing is in pace. AI adoption alone has jumped from 43% last year to 60% this year. That tells us businesses are starting to experiment, test, and in some cases genuinely rethink how work gets done.
And yes, AI can help. It’s very good at the kind of jobs most of us quietly dread (data input, summaries, repetitive admin). But technology on its own isn’t a magic fix. You can’t automate your way out of a bad process or a culture that’s stuck in “we’ve always done it this way”.
The most productive businesses are the ones joining the dots, using the right tools, with the right processes, and a team that understands why it all matters.
One slightly worrying finding is that 58% of businesses told us they don’t have the tools or framework to build a productivity strategy. Which probably explains why many feel stuck in that cycle of reacting rather than improving.
And that’s exactly where we can help.
At Jersey Business, we work with businesses to step back from the noise, challenge how things are done, and identify practical ways to improve efficiency. Not in a theoretical, 200-slide PowerPoint kind of way, but in a way that actually works in the real world (and fits around everything else you’re juggling).
Because productivity isn’t about working harder. It’s about making the hours you already have work better.
The challenge
So, here’s the challenge: if you suddenly got two hours back every day, what would you do with it?
And more importantly… what’s stopping you getting it back now?
If you’re not sure, come and challenge us. We’d love to help, and we promise not to book a meeting just to talk about booking another meeting.
